Standing in a pink desert landscape, I looked down and realized I’d become a robot, with skinny metal legs and pincers for hands. Without warning or explanation, my hands became cannons and began firing projectiles, which, on further inspection, I saw were small metallic cats. In the sky, a giant cat appeared; it shook an infant’s bottle, and stars came out.

Earlier that same day, I spent time as a black woman, in a neurocosmetology salon of the future. According to the staff, I needed both hair-styling and a neurological upgrade; namely, “transcranial extensions designed to make the brain’s synapses more excitable and primed to increase neuroplasticity.” The procedure involved a trip to what appeared to be another plane of consciousness. After it was done, I heard someone say, “I’m disappointed just to be a white guy again.”

These experiences—there is no other word for them—were some of the Sundance Festival’s more interesting responses to the perennial question: Just what, exactly, is virtual reality for? Over the years, the festival, which runs through this week, has become a showcase for V.R., and the sheer variety of what’s attempted reflects the fact that absolutely no one knows just what niche the technology fills. Such growing pains might cause investors some anxiety, but they are good news for the rest of us, for we seem to be entering the springtime of the medium’s soul—V.R.’s own period of teen-age experimentalism. As in the early days of film, or of radio, or the PC, or the Web, just about every noodle is being thrown at the wall.

Consider that Sundance attracts a good amount of what is sometimes called high-art V.R. The point is to experience what someone of great creative talent—an artist—might do to you given total control of both of your eyeballs. The result is an experience that usually lacks a conventional narrative, or even a time sequence. As with art itself, whether or not these experiences ever reach a mass audience seems beside the point. A work such as “Orbital Vanitas,” by the director Shaun Gladwell, in which you are enveloped by a huge floating skull, is an end in itself. This kind of V.R. is better experienced on the best equipment there is—suggesting that such works will generally be accessed at art galleries or film festivals. A less highbrow variation—such as “Chocolate,” by Tyler Hurd, described above, with its psychedelic cats—just aims for an enjoyable experience, if not necessarily an edifying one. This work’s natural home may be in the reincarnation of the old video-game arcades, where the social potential of V.R. could be tested.

Others at Sundance pushed so-called Web V.R., the norms of which are unmistakably of the Internet and northern California. The idea is to induce a broad, quasi-amateur creator base to produce V.R. and share their productions on a cheap and open platform. Jamie Byrne, of YouTube, describes a future in which low-cost but decent virtual-reality goggles are ubiquitous in the home and in the office, and maybe carried with you. As with Web video, this type of V.R. is produced by lots of people—not just by professional artists or creators. It is, in theory, democratic in curation: the good stuff gets shared, and bubbles to the top. It is an attractive vision, although there’s a missing link: the equipment needed to make V.R. remains very expensive, at least for now.

In addition to V.R. for the sake of art, or for the sake of sharing, Sundance is also home to a third class of experiential V.R.: the narrative or scripted variety, which uses the technology to tell a story. The culture and backers of narrative V.R. are distinctly of the Hollywood and Sundance film worlds. Consider Eric Darnell, for example, who was one of the directors of the Dreamworks blockbuster “Madagascar” and is now trying, along with the game designer and animator Maureen Fan, to crack the code in narrative V.R. Their V.R. cartoons “Invasion!” and “Asteroids!” are stories, but they are also experiments in making audiences pay attention to subtle social cues so that they follow the plot. For my money, the most impressive scripted V.R. at Sundance was “Miyubi,” directed by Félix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphaël. For forty minutes, the viewer just sits and watches a family in the nineteen-eighties fuss and fight over the addition of a robot to the household. Perhaps it is my age or the use of human actors, but I honestly felt that I’d travelled through time and landed in the home of one of my childhood friends, circa 1981, “Battlestar Galactica” curtains and all. Intentionally or not, “Miyubi” hinted at the “pensieve” from Harry Potter—a device that allows you to go back to earlier parts of your own life. It was a reminder that the best V.R. really does feel like magic.

“Miyubi” was funded by Facebook, which is almost certainly the biggest spender in this area. As the owner of Oculus, the leading goggle maker, Facebook is in a position not unlike that of radio manufacturers in the nineteen-twenties. It wants something to be out there so that people will want to buy those goggles. Facebook claims to have spent two hundred and fifty million dollars on content already—much of it on gaming—and says that it plans to spend two hundred and fifty million more, presumably on ambitious projects that juice the industry. At Sundance, the company also premièred “Dear Angelica,” an animated story about a daughter’s relationship with her actress mother, who is voiced by Geena Davis.

Experimental periods are common to new media, and what emerges can sometimes be very surprising. Online computer networks didn’t really get far until AOL’s infamous chat rooms and e-mail accounts emerged. Broadcasting was a niche, hobbyist product until someone put a boxing game on the radio. One thing, however, can be said about these examples: the new medium usually succeeded not by offering an improved version of what had been done before but by offering something that was profoundly different in an unexpected way.

This suggests that the kind of V.R. that tries to enhance or translate something that already exists may not ultimately win the day. (V.R. gaming, for example, hasn’t been as great a success as people hoped, so far.) Novelty is one thing, but, to bring people back, it may be important to offer an experience different enough, either in kind or intensity, to make people feel that they need to go through the bother of getting those goggles and putting them on. And this is why the more artistic visions of V.R.—even if not commercially significant—may be so important for the medium. The best of them trigger feelings different from and quite alien to our normal experience. They can activate the emotions of the disassociated mind—feelings like euphoria and awe, a loss of identity, deeper forms of empathy, and rarefied sensations of sadness and joy. If nothing else, the experience of “NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism,” the neurocosmetology film shown at Sundance, was certainly different from reading the morning newspaper. The taste for such emotions can develop; V.R. may really begin to take off at the point when people feel that they want or need those emotions and just can’t get them elsewhere.

Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School and a former contributing writer for newyorker.com.